SQA appeals and university applications?

[Ginko]

Having had child awarded a wrong grade that was corrected on appeal, I was wondering how appeals work for university applicants - people applying not those with conditional offers? Do they work?

You can prioritise an appeal if you have a conditional offer but the SQA suggest not it not. If you are applying for medicine/vet/oxbridge your UCAS application has to be in before you might hear back (DC heard back right at the end of October). A university might even have rejected you before you have heard. Surely this shouldn’t hold?

An appeal is just a recount of the existing marks awarded.
So no - they dont redo the marks all over again.
Only 10% of I think nearly 40,000 appeals last year were successful.
You'll only get a grade increase if the original marker was stupid and couldn't count. Very unlikely. It's literally just a check if they counted properly.
I wouldn't bother TBH. The appeals process has changed and not for the better.

I agree the appeals process is rubbish - just a check that the marker has not made a stupid mistake. However, last year my DC had an examiner that did so and the appeal was successful. Definitely worth doing if you got an unexpectedly low score on a paper. A lot appealed purely because they were a mark or two off the next grade. Apparently these borderline cases are already rechecked, but also the score itself didn’t suggest anything wrong so not surprising those appeals didn’t succeed.

However that was not my question. Given there were 4,000 or so successful appeals there may have been students appealing who were hoping to apply for eg medicine but got AAABB knocking their chances. Lifting on B to an A would be the difference between applying for medicine or looking to another course. However if you cannot put in a priority appeal you are scuppered. That does not seem reasonable.

Not quite just a recount - they will check marking instructions have been applied correctly.

"What is the Appeals Service?
If you appeal your grade, a senior appointee will carry out a marking review of your SQA-marked assessments.
This is not a re-mark.
A marking review checks that:

• all parts of your SQA-assessments have been marked
• the marking is in line with national standards
• the marks given for each answer have been totalled correctly; and
• the correct result has been entered on our system."

I can't remember my DCs friends getting rejections from early UCAS applications until at least December which was around the time when appeals were known. Plus unis don't see UCAT scores till November anyway (BMAT later) Perhaps school can flag non-priority appeals for early consideration. Does UCAS form allow you to indicate you are appealing grades. Maybe need to take gap year but presume very strong pre-test score might make a difference. They might just wait until final grades known and include in later batch of interviewees.